Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff defends -- quite well, I think -- his newspaper's use of a large photo on Saturday of children's bodies from the Beslan massacre.

"Reporting the news about the school being raided and people being killed is one thing," Beth Lukas of Crystal Lake said in a representative phone message. "But your picture on the front page, I think, borders on sensationalism. That is not necessary. It is a disgusting, sickening picture."

With all due respect, Mrs. Lukas, I couldn't disagree more. If you view a painting of a Jesus in his mother's arms at the foot of the cross and all you see is a dead guy with nail holes in him, then yes, the picture is "disgusting." If you look at a still-life of game animals on a medieval kitchen table and all you see is dead rabbits and birds, then yes, the picture is "sickening."

In the case of the Russian school slaughter, "disgusting" and "sickening" would have been the image of the one child, his thin, broken, nearly naked body in a state of disarray, being carried dead on a stretcher out of the burned, bombed school.

"Disgusting" and "sickening" would have been any of the images of children's bodies, stacked up like so many pieces of firewood, in a closet.

But by comparison with those pictures, the photograph that the Tribune ran was a Pieta. Not only was it decorous and respectful; it was a work of art.

"It wasn't the dead bodies that made the picture," said Jonathan Elderfield, the picture editor who handled the Russia story Friday for the photo desk. "It was the emotion."

He was referring to the actions of the three adults in the photo--and especially of the woman, clad in a black dress and stooped to the ground at the head of one of the stretchers that bore the children's bodies. Her right arm is extended and her right hand rests lightly upon the forehead of a little girl whose body, except for the head, is shrouded in a white sheet. The woman's other hand is at her own throat--the better to squelch her own sobs, perhaps?

But it is her face, drawn and filled with an unutterable sadness, that draws the viewer's attention. If you were indifferent to this story before, if Beslan, Russia, might as well have been on the far side of the moon, you could not fail to care and to empathize after seeing that woman's--that mother's--grief-stricken face.

>Publishing pictures that might offend [Chicago Tribune]